ITOM software market rises 4.8 pc in 2012

Worldwide IT operations management (ITOM) software revenue totalled $18 billion in 2012, up 4.8 percent from $17 billion in 2011, according to final results from Gartner, Inc. The “Big Four” ITOM vendors—IBM, CA Technologies, BMC Software and HP however, surrendered market share in 2012, while a new generation of ITOM vendors grew significantly faster than the market, said the IT advisory and market research company.

“Vendor revenue in the 2012 ITOM software market demonstrated moderate single-digit growth, after two consecutive years of nearly double-digit growth, due to slow economic growth, tight IT budgets, and merger and acquisition activity,” said Laurie Wurster, research director at Gartner.

Pushing the growth of the ITOM market were continued investments in virtualization management tools and cloud computing technologies, which are the key drivers behind the growth in the configuration management and availability and performance segments, and also in the other ITOM category, in which cloud management platform pure-play vendors are represented.

The top five ITOM vendors, ranked by revenue, grew 0.6 percent in 2012, compared with 7 percent growth in 2011, and accounted for 55 percent share, or $9.9 billion, of the overall ITOM software market in terms of revenue. The ranking of the top five vendors did not change from 2010 through 2012. Among the top five vendors, Microsoft led the group in year-over-year growth with 16 percent, while the rest of the top five remained flat or saw declining growth.

The most interesting vendors to watch in terms of dynamics will be those with revenue ranging from $100 million to $500 million. Strategies on business models (software as a service [SaaS], subscription and cloud-based), as well as partnering programs to obtain reach into regions outside North America, Western Europe and mature Asia/Pacific, will be key to growth.

-Laurie Wurster, Research Director, Gartner Inc

CA Technologies and BMC Software are tracking neck and neck, with less than $200 million between them. After displacing HP from the fourth position in 2010, Microsoft continues to rapidly gain on BMC and CA Technologies, with Microsoft just less than $650 million behind CA Technologies.

At the regional level, North America, Western Europe and mature Asia/Pacific were the prime consumers of ITOM software in 2012. Nearly 90 percent of this market is concentrated in these developed markets, suggesting that the older and more complex the infrastructure is, the more organizations need tools to manage it. Although emerging Asia/Pacific and Latin America remained growth leaders in 2012, neither was able to sustain the strong growth they experienced in 2011. The biggest laggards were Eastern Europe, Eurasia and Sub-Saharan Africa, with decreases of more than 1.5 percent each. All other areas saw low- to mid-single-digit growth.

Across the ITOM segments, workload automation and IT process automation (distributed) was the only product segment able to maintain the strong double-digit growth experienced in 2011. Most other segments experienced a 2 percent to 3 percent year-over-year decline in growth rates compared with 2011. Many ITOM subcategories are commoditizing, as end users replace high-cost tools from the Big Four vendors with lower-cost tools at a 10th of the cost overall, thereby contracting the market and providing high growth for many low-cost providers.

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